In the wake of the pandemic, it has been public education teachers who have put their all into teaching the children of Utah in this entirely new way. Still, lawmakers want to make further cuts into educational funding despite it already being mediocre at best.
Most teachers are expected to fund their classrooms with supplies out of their own pockets, yet state lawmakers are more than willing to further bleed the teachers dry. Not only are they expected to learn this new format of teaching children, but it must be understood that despite the pandemic, they are expected to show up to schools and help with anything needed. This spans helping with lunches during the start of the pandemic to helping students who don’t have computers.
Teachers are putting their lives directly on the line, yet all the reward they have gotten is an expected budget cut.
I find it laughable that teachers could be giving more than they are earning to the schools. As an education major, it has already been clearly stated that it will be increasingly difficult to live off a teaching wage.
Now, with this budget cut, parents will see teachers as the perpetrators of their students’ lack of success in class, not the government’s lack of funding the programs that would help their students succeed.
Utahns, for the future enlightenment of your young ones, please speak up. One of the best ways to ensure the proper education of future generations, and thus better society as a whole, is to make sure they have the things they need to succeed.
If teachers are expected to provide even more than expected already — which is far too much — then there will be fewer and fewer teachers. These teachers will be stretched even thinner, and students will not receive the one-on-one teaching so many of them desperately crave. Students will just become numbers and will not receive the love of education, nurtured into them from a young age. We will raise a generation far dumber than we already are, and I do not think that we can afford that.
